Published by Douglas Messerli, the World Cinema Review features full-length reviews on film from the beginning of the industry to the present day, but the primary focus is on films of intelligence and cinematic quality, with an eye to exposing its readers to the best works in international film history.

Monday, February 9, 2015

David Hand (and others of Disney Studio) | Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (as part of "Three Films for Turing")

three films for turing

After reading
the Turing biography by Andrew Hodges, I determined to revisit three films
which I had seen previously, the first, one I saw as a child, Disney’s animated
1937 work, Snow
White and the Seven Dwarfs. Turing
commented to friends about that film, and was particular fascinated by the
poison apple which resulted in Snow White’s suspension into sleep, which, given
Turing’s own choice of death, as I mention above, imbues his reactions with far
greater meaning.

The second film, Desk Set, which I’ve watched dozens of time (it’s
one of Howard and my favorite Christmas movies), was made just three years
after Turing’s death in 1954, and makes references to a figure vaguely similar
to Turing in the central character is a computer inventor, who has previously
been involved with top-secret governmental activities that not even the crack
researcher-librarian who falls in love with him could uncover. That film itself
was a head-on cultural confrontation with some of Turing’s predictions,
querying and exploring just how much a human being the computer, named EMARAC (Electromagnetic
Memory and Research Arithmetical Calculator, named after the American-made
ENIAC machine.), a film which also momentarily injects some of the names of the
seven dwarfs as Santa’s reindeer.

The third film, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space
Odyssey of 1968, was, according to author
Arthur C. Clarke and director Stanley Kubrick, dated in response to Turing’s
paper in the journal Mind, wherein,
in 1950, he had predicted the existence in 2000 of computers with enough
storage power to allow to “play the imitation game so well that an average
interrogator will not have more than a 70 percent chance of making the right identification
after five minutes of questioning; such a computer, of course, came alive in
Kubrick’s film as HAL 9000, who (or which, depending upon whether one’s been able to properly identify the mechanized
imitator), upon discovering that his human controllers are about to disconnect
him, disconnects one of the spaceman’s air hoses and locks him out of the space
POD.

Although I kept Turing very much in mind,
accordingly, while viewing these works, I also attempted to relive my own
youthful relationships to the films in order to explore how I had personally
felt about some of the consequences of Turing’s world and creations.

In
trying to determine when I first saw the great animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, I
supposed it might have been in 1958, at the age of 11. Although the film also
was re-released in 1952, when I was five, I wondered whether it would be
possible that at such an early age the film had made such a lasting impression
upon me. But then, it dawned on me that, at 11, a year in which I was
intellectually ingesting Hitchcock’s Vertigo,
it seemed highly unlikely that I had suddenly become so enthused with what was obviously
a children’s picture, so it must have been in 1952 when I first saw the work,
just two years before Turing, himself, ate of the poisoned apple.

What
also also struck me, this time around, is that although I have always declared
that my only early musical experiences had been Oklahoma! of 1955 and Carousel
of one-year later, it is apparent that Snow
White, whichwas something near
to an old-fashioned operetta (there are fewer spoken lines in this picture than
musical ones), had also contributed to my love of the American musical comedy
genre.

I have always thought of Snow White as being entangled in the
same branches, so to speak, of German and Nordic tales such as Sleeping Beauty; how else to explain the
“little men,” whose forest home Snow White invades like Goldilocks but as
connected to Wagner’s Niebelungs, working in their own private diamond mine?.
And the Disney animators, so influenced by German Expressionism in the
nighttime forest scenes, help to tie this work to its German roots. Moreover,
this story, in its focus on a young girl who is treated by her step-mother as a
scullery maid in her own home, has similarities to another Grimm Brother’s
tale, Aschenputtel.

Yet Even as a child, I am certain, I was
more enchanted by the evil Queen and her monstrously honest mirror (performed
by the voice of Moroni Olsen) than I was with the silly girl passively waiting
out her time for her Prince Charming to come. The Queen (voiced by Lucille La
Verne), like my mother, was not only forceful, but was willing to go into
action herself when others, such as the Huntsman, had failed her. And her
willingness, despite her insufferable vanity, to transform herself outwardly as
she was within, awed me. If Snow White lived in a world of Bambi and little, messy forest gnomes, the Queen proudly hunkered
down with spiders, toads, crows and those magnificently snouted vultures, who,
after the witch she has becomes falls of the cliff to her death, slowly spiral
down for the feast!

Like Alan Turing I too was fascinated how
much work had gone into the making of that little red apple soured with death.
And the fact that, despite all of her wizardry—her poetic incantations and
charm spells, in which nature itself, lightning and thunder, collaborated—there
was still such a simple way of breaking the magic spell: a kiss. To a
five-year-old, what was a kiss? Snow White, herself, doles them out to those
little men as they head off to work, with a peck upon their heads. But Dopey,
lips puckered up into some almost obscene gesture, seemed to be expecting
something else—another kind of kiss which I certainly had never truly
experienced at age 5 except upon the movie screens. And when that kiss in consecrated
late in the movie, it is, if one actually thinks too carefully about it, quite
shocking, given the fact that the woman to whom the Prince bends down to kiss
upon her lips is dead.

Underneath the seeming innocence of this
film, accordingly, lies not only issues of neurotic vanity, false imprisonment
and torture (in an earlier version of the Disney film, the evil Queen imprisons
the Prince and entertains him with visions of dancing skeletons) and hints of
pederasty (after all, the young girl actually slept in the beds of seven men),
but gives evidence of attempted child-murder and necrophilia—so say nothing of
the misogynistic remarks of Grumpy and the complete idiocy of Dopey.

And then, there are all of those
unanswered questions: for whom are the dwarfs mining their diamonds, and how do
they obtain all those foodstuffs that go into the soup and gooseberry pies Snow
White cooks up? And why do they seem to know so much about the evil Queen and her
tricks of which they warn Snow White on their way to work. Why doesn’t she, in
turn, listen to them; is she so dumb that she cannot see beyond the old crone’s
nose? In contemporary times, we must teach even the most innocent of young
girls to stay out of the houses of little, old men and never, never invite in
any women offering up apples!

Finally, what to make of the relationship
that this young girl has to deer, chipmunks, turtles and robins? If it’s
further evidence of Snow White’s purity and innocence, it also smacks of a kind
of human enslavement of beasts: the animals certainly seem willing to do most
of her work without even a peck upon their heads.

In the end one even wonders a bit the
vitality and health about Snow White. Throughout most of this splendid operetta
she dreams and sleeps her life away. Even while scrubbing the stairs outside
the castle, she spends her time dreaming of her Prince (“Some Day My Prince
Will Come”) and her very scary night in the forest—where she encounters a
memorable surrealist-like landscape of open eyes—ends with in her again in the
prone position, her own eyes drenched in tears. The minute she gets the dwarfs
house all spiffed up, she’s tired again and lays down for a nap. After dinner
and just a little partying, she’s ready once more to rush off to bed. One gets
the feeling, just perhaps, that Snow White suffers (just like Sleepy) a bit
from narcolepsy.

And hardly do the little men get out the
door before she’s laid flat again by that poisoned apple. It just may be that
our sweetheart may subconsciously preferred to sleep and dream that live out
her dreary days by cleaning up for the Queen and then, even worse, for seven
messy little men! Did she really imagine that the Prince might find her in that
thatched cottage hidden in the middle of the forest?

Had Turing, like Snow White, simply worn
himself out with all of his mental efforts to save and protect the evil Queen
who, equally jealous of his intellectual prowess, had been willing to
symbolically lock him up?In some
respects, unlike the fate of the lovely Snow White, the dwarfs of post-war
world had already attempted to bury him even while he was living. Certainly, it
must have seemed to him, in many instances, that he was living in a never-ending
night resembling Snow White’s frightful flight, with all eyes upon him. It
might have seemed wonderful to have a long night’s sleep at last.